


Vigil Strange

by snagov



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Coda: s03e117, Drinking Games, First Kiss, Love, M/M, Mutual Pining, Never Have I Ever, Season/Series 03 Spoilers, a bunch of archivists play never have i ever, the night before the house of wax
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-13
Updated: 2020-04-13
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:01:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23629678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snagov/pseuds/snagov
Summary: Never has Jon ever fallen in love with someone at the Magnus Institute.*(Not true.)
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 127
Kudos: 799
Collections: tma fics





	Vigil Strange

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to y'all out there who encouraged this and are therefore at fault. Title from Whitman's "Vigil strange I kept on the field one night".

When Jon was a child, his grandmother would tell him stories about the end of the world. By the time he was eleven years old, he knew every detail of how it would go, starting with the Rapture of the righteous from their beds and swimming pools, down to where Christ would first walk upon his return. By the time he was twelve, Jon was pretty certain it was all a lie. 

Now, at thirty years old and furiously sweeping his office in nervous fear, Jon considers the third option. The end of the world will come and he will have no idea who is driving it nor why. _I never wanted to be an Archivist._ No, _if_ Jonathan Sims makes it out of the Archivist business alive, he would like to be a writer someday. He knows that when he writes his memoir, he will call it _"an emergency in slow motion"._ The question has never been whether or not things were falling down around him, but rather how quickly it had all come apart. 

Nervous tension crowds his spine. He works a broom behind the desk, trying to wedge it past a metal filing cabinet. The broom comes back with bristles full of dust-rotted spiderwebs. He shudders, carrying it to the kitchen to knock out the horror into the trash. The kitchen smells like cheap beer and whiskey and there's a clutch of half-lit faces around the battered wooden table.

"What are you still doing here?" He asks. Though, truthfully, the bottles speak for themselves.

"Drinking, yeah?" Tim waves a lazy hand at the cacophony of bottles. "Come on, here you go." He reaches for an empty glass and a bottle of whiskey, shoving them both in Jon's direction. Jon scowls. 

"Look,” Basira says. “It’s probably our last night."

"We'll be _fine_ \- "

" _Will_ we?" Tim asks. His stare is hard.

Jon swallows. "Probably not."

“Right.”

“A lot of things I never got to do,” Melanie says, refilling her glass. 

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Travel to Italy. Learn how to paint. Lots of things.”

“Never have I ever been drunk enough to be kicked out of a pub,” Tim says with a wry grin.

Melanie raises a brow and drinks. Everyone, even Jon, has to laugh. 

“Never have _I_ ever stolen my bosses’ whiskey collection to get shitfaced on,” Melanie shoots back, never taking her eyes off of Tim. He laughs and drinks. Martin twists his own hands around his glass, worrying his fingers into the laser-cut etchings. 

“I mean, should we really be doing this -“

“Your turn, Martin.”

“I’m not sure.”

“Come on, Martin,” Melanie says, leaning over. Martin shifts and his sneaker moves to rest alongside Jon's. Jon pauses. Martin seems to carry on, entirely unaware of the two inches of contact between them, that certainly the stiff and unforgiving pressure his foot has come to rest against is simply the base of the table and not at all his boss' leather boot. 

“Well. Never have I ever - um,” Martin hesitates. His skin seems to be flushed. His breathing is quick. Jon is fascinated by what he might say. Jon is terrified of what he might say. There's something thin and tenuous between them, something that could be brushed away with a lazy word or a careless hand. With an easy sentence, Jon could learn that Martin has never thought about anyone at this table in _that_ way at all. He's wondered if this _something_ between them is all in his head. He watches Martin's mouth, eyes on those soft and chapped lips, dangerously curious about what might come out.

Martin breathes in. “Never have I ever been arrested.”

Bullet dodged.

“What a surprise,” Tim mutters. Jon’s hand tightens on his glass. The group sets their sights on him now, waiting for his own contribution. 

He twists his brow, considering. 

_Never have I ever. Never have I ever walked home without listening for footsteps behind me. Never have I ever not looked under the bed. Never have I ever slept through the night without one terror or another nipping at my heels._ Fear comes naturally to him. He looks at his hands, laced with protruding veins and webs of worm-bait scars. Jon doesn't remember his father but he does remember his mother. Her delicate hands, just like his own. He doesn't remember her hands in the act of tucking him in nor brushing back his hair. He doesn't remember her ever peeling the skin from a tomato or slicing a pear for a bite. Instead, her hands counted out the bullets for the revolver beneath her pillow and kept strychnine in the sewing tin. The fear ran like madness in her veins and he shares the same plumbing. 

What are you afraid of, Jonathan Sims?

Everything. 

The shoe is everything against him. When Martin laughs, his clothing rustles against Jon’s and everything beyond the boundaries of their corner goes dark. 

_Never have I ever held your hand._

Tomorrow lingers like a debt collector. A shadow at the door, giving us some little time to say our goodbyes. Jon has always been a precocious child, managing the space of his grandmother's anxiety as well as his own. He had learned to pick up the pieces of her long silences and heavy frowns, to polish them up with apologies. To re-examine his own habits. What he had done, what he could do to avoid these sharp stillnesses. He had known then, even at eight years old, that it was his responsibility alone to keep the peace. He brought his grandmother tea and didn't make a fuss and kept the world bandaged together. Sometimes she bought him books. 

She never asked him about them. 

Memory makes strange prisoners of us. Jon does not have his family but he still feels the weight of them bearing down upon his shoulders. He stands at his own kitchen sink and remembers his grandmothers’ orthopedic shoes and short-cropped grey hair. He remembers his mother’s dark curls, her pale-eyes and blank stare. The red cut of her mouth. Revlon red, he knows from digging in her purse for mints. _Cherries in the Snow._ He had covered himself in it once, drawing spirals up and down his child arms and legs. Webs of red over and over again. She had picked him up with both hands, the red of fury in her cheeks, and scrubbed him down with tar-scented carbolic soap. His skin had stayed pink for days. Whether it was from the residual lipstick or the rough washcloth, he couldn’t say. 

Yes, he remembers his mother. She would tuck him into bed with the Bible dripping from her fingertips. He is afraid of passing by phone booths. Yes, his mother is dead, but that does not mean she will not call. 

That was an unpleasant memory. He reaches for a better one. He remembers when he met Martin, his fellow archival assistant. Martin had walked up to him and handed him a ceramic cup of Earl Grey tea. He had smelled like bergamot on that first day. In Jon's memory, he smells of bergamot still.

“Thank you," Jon had said.

“Oh. It’s nothing.”

His name is Martin Blackwood, Jon had spied it upon some paperwork but he had offered it up anyway, just like that cup of tea. Jon had given his own in turn and Martin had pronounced it carefully. “Hi, Jonathan.” Jon had felt his hands go damp even then, under those harsh fluorescent lights, staring at a man with hair like copper and eyes like scorched earth.

"Call me Jon," he had said. So Martin does.

Sometimes Jon hears an old lullaby in the cadences of Martin's voice. Catches the shadow of a superstition. He doesn't need to ask Martin to know that they must both come from somewhere similar. Both born deep in the West Country, deep in the stink of fishermen and ghost stories. Jon knows now that Martin is from Devonshire, two hours west along the southern coast and just as riddled with the weight of history. He wonders sometimes if the soil was just as piss-poor there, thick with Eocene clay and native heath. Carnivorous sundews flourished in Bournemouth, trapping flies along their sticky leaves and dissolving them bit by bit as the sun moved across the sky. He had trampled through the bog asphodel as a boy and kicked rocks from the cliffs by the sea, watching them crash with a white splash into the water. 

For a long while, Jon had not wanted to ask where Martin was from. He had heard the West Country in his voice and wondered if they might have once shared a patch of earth. 

* * *

Jon settles on something finally. "Never have I ever streaked naked through a graveyard."

"It was a _cemetery_ ," Tim says, drinking anyway. "And it was just once."

Basira gives a sharp laugh and throws her entry in. "Never have I ever kissed a coworker."

Both Tim and Daisy drink. Jon keeps eye contact with Tim, watching how Tim's eyes flicker from Martin to Jon and back again. Martin seems blithely unaffected, as if there is nothing in the statement to notice. Jon can't decide if that is worse. _Maybe I have been making it all up in my head. There probably isn't anything is there? Look at yourself, Jon, so desperate for anyone to like you that you start spinning it out of nothing. Have you even looked at yourself lately? I know I look like I haven't slept in a month now. My damn eyes are so bloodshot, the sclera look full pink. I'm bloody riddled with scars. Worm scars. My hair is more grey now than black. Maybe on some men it looks distinguished, as they say. On me, well, it just looks like spiderwebs._

_Fucking spiderwebs._

"Never have I ever wanted to," says Basira. 

_Fuck._ Jon lifts his glass. But he isn't alone. Martin does as well. Then he realizes that Tim, Basira, Daisy, and Melanie have all raised their glasses. He drinks and survives. 

_Who did you want to kiss? Was it another job? Somewhere else? I know you worked at a bakery for awhile when you were younger. Was it there, between the bakery racks with flour on your cheeks and egg wash and poppy seeds knocked to the floor? Was it there? You worked at a bookshop for a period. I know, I shouldn't have looked at your file. Was it there? Did you want to kiss someone in the fiction section, somewhere between Auster and Zamyatin?_

"Never have I wanted to kiss someone at the _\--_ " Melanie begins. There's a special light in Tim's eyes. A spider has spun a web of dread across Jon's chest and it clenches. He knows what the next question will be. How it will tear apart everything. A disaster. _Never have I ever wanted to kiss someone at the Institute._

The table suddenly upends and several bottles of whiskey spill. 

“Oh, _fuck,_ ” Tim hisses. 

“Oh dear,” Martin presses paper towels to the spreading stain. “So sorry. Didn’t _mean_ to, promise. Really clumsy sometimes. Just been nervous, you know? We should probably call it a night, shouldn’t we? Big … day tomorrow and all.”

Jon rubs his eyes with a tired hand, hiding his relief in his palm. "Why don't you all just go get some sleep. I'll take care of it."

They leave. The coats and jackets disappear. Jon doesn't remember making an exception for Martin yet, somehow, it's just the two of them left. There's dust on Jon's jeans, grey on the knees. There's a wad of whiskey-soaked paper towels in Martin's hands. Those hands, which seem to have nothing of fear in them, impossibly steady at every turn. The fear is always there on Martin's face and in his words. Unlike Jon, who pulls it inward and builds his life upon it, letting oxygen flow on the back of his fear, Martin simply names his. There's an honesty there, on Martin's warm face. Jon has never figured out how to tell the truth so well. He wants to touch those hands and steady himself. To press his nose into the forest green of the ridiculous cardigan, the Millennium Falcon t-shirt, to breathe in the fresh breeze scent of his laundry soap. 

_I love you._ It is the first time that Jon thinks this. The first time he realizes it's true. He wonders which of his grandmother’s soaps will wash it out for him.

"Thank you," is what he says. Whether he is thanking Martin for knocking over the whiskey bottle or for staying to clean it up after, he isn't sure. Perhaps both. Perhaps neither. Perhaps something else entirely. 

"For what?" 

Jon shrugs. He picks up the littered empty bottles from the table and reaches for the paper towel. Martin passes it to him, their skin briefly grazing each other. _Warm. You feel warm._ He looks up and Martin is already staring at him. His eyes are the curious color of a thunderstorm, a grey hazel rarely seen anywhere else but across a threatening sky. When he tries to speak, his mouth is cotton-dry and tongue grown fat and limp. Martin looks at their hands again, where they had touched once, then back

"Come back safe, okay?" Martin asks.

Jon nods. No one has ever asked him to come back safely. Not for him alone. (His mother had kept him safe so that she might have a friend. His grandmother as it was the right thing to do. Never just for him. Never him alone.) There’s aconite dripping from his sharp tongue and Jon finds he even has a polemic against his own safety. The bitter man can fight anyone, stab at anything. Even himself.

 _Never have I ever._ Truth comes in two flavors. What we choose to share, what we keep to ourselves. We confess by omission sometimes, cling to _but I never said that._ It doesn't matter, does it? We're smarter than that. We read negative space as well as highlighted words. 

_Never have I never been loved._ How do you learn to love? 

Jon stares at Martin and there is an interval of three feet between them. Three feet of air. Three feet of negative space. Nothing said and everything laid out in bare confession. For a moment, he is fourteen years old again and his hand still tingles from where Clive, the baker's son, had clutched it during a movie. They had snuck in. Popcorn salt is still beneath his fingernails and Jon doesn't breathe as his grandmother takes a phone call from Mrs. Vaughn of Cobb Road, asking him later _did you hold hands with that boy? Are you like that? Don't ignore me, Jon._

Perhaps his grandmother would have grown used to it. Instead, Jon had torn out his own tongue at the root and never spoken of love again. 

Jon is used to fear. His hands rattle. This one he hasn't written down. This one he hasn't recorded. Tomorrow has signed for him already and lingers at the door, waiting for the delivery. Look at him, skinny and strange, his heart's never even been taken out of the packaging. Never been used, good as new. Be a shame to waste it. To die tomorrow, never even having loved or been loved once. 

Martin still stands in the doorway, looking warm. Once, as a child, Jon had had a book of legends and myths. The giants had crossed their causeways with sturdy backs and tree-trunk legs, their hair red and wild and whistling as they went. Martin has a soft voice and wide shoulders. He has steady hands and honest fears. There is no popcorn salt under his fingernails. 

_Come back safe,_ Martin had said. 

Why? Jon turns the sentence over, examining it. Why would Martin want him to stay safe? For what purpose? Jon watches the warm glow of the Tungsten light shift across Martin's corduroy pants. 

"I'll try," he says. 

Martin nods. 

Jon is thirty years old. He has been kissed a handful of times, each a surprise. All as sticky and strange as the sundew and its fly-slick. He’s never felt an urge to kiss someone, not like this. Not with the full awareness of years of proximity that Martin will smell like cedar and wool. A bit of sweat behind the ears. Cheap drugstore shampoo. That his skin will be warm and clean and that Martin will be careful, will let Jon circle him and come to him and never ask for too much.

Jon realizes he is still staring at Martin. His cheeks color. He wonders if this is how his mother had felt, looking at his father across a library table while teaching him how to make the sounds of English vowels and consonants with his tongue. He bites the inside of his cheek. It is an odd thing to think. 

"Why don't you want me to come?"

"It's dangerous."

"Jon."

"There's no need for you to be there. The fewer, the better, and - "

"Jon."

"Martin, stop." 

Martin bites his lip and nods, breathing in. He turns to finish cleaning the table. At the end of it all, with a spray of Lysol, it looks as if they'd never been there at all. Jon stares uneasily at the shining woodgrain, pockmarked with years of sharp elbows and scratching pens. As blank and open as a piece of paper, waiting for the next group to scribble upon it. It wouldn't be hard to pretend they had never been there. It wouldn't be hard to pretend that nothing had been said, that he had not run his tongue along the edges of the negative space between them and known the shape of it. _Never have I ever._

"When you get back," Martin says, not offering an _if._ His voice shakes but he presses on. "When you get back, we're going to - talk. About it."

Jon closes his eyes. In the darkness, Martin's voice lights the way. His words point to an Exit sign, giving him an out. _When you get back._ Another moment of _you don't have to, not right now. Not if you don't want to._ His shoulders twist under his own black knit jumper, realizing that even that could be erased. Cast back to _never._ Martin will never push him. 

"Martin."

Martin looks up at him. "Yes?"

What can he say? _My name is Jonathan Sims. I was born to a woman who howled like a cat and my grandmother held seances on Sundays. She told me to wait my turn to speak, that the dead hadn't finished yet. That I'd know when it was my time. I hate to be touched without knowing it's coming. The brush of something along my skin when I'm not looking reminds me of hundreds of legs and pale spiderwebs. My laundry always turns grey, no matter how much bleach I use. I'm always tired, no matter how much I sleep. My first album was Lou Reed's Transformer and I would lay on my bed and count the marks on the ceiling while listening. Sometimes I think about running away but I don't think there's anywhere to go._

_I've never told anyone I loved them. I've never been loved._

_Never have I ever._

Tomorrow, he will go into the dark. To the House of Wax with nothing in his pocket but a Hail Mary and a bit of C4. Even a gambler doesn't like those odds. The House always wins. _God requires sacrifices,_ his grandmother had always said, tucking his prayer book into his small hands. She drank a bit and smoked a bit and told everyone to go on up the mountain with Abraham. If you're lucky, he won't ask you to lay your head against the stone. _It's been a good run,_ he thinks. He's been lucky so far. Luck only gets you so far. He grits his molars, never having imagined that he'd go to the slaughter without complaint and light the kindling himself. 

Time has a way of making fools of us all. God, Martin seems to be the only warmth in the room. The only warmth that matters anymore. There is the dark and there is a light that never goes out. They have three feet between them. Jon finds that his feet solve that problem, covering the short distance. Martin watches him move, his eyes very wide. This close, Jon has to look up to keep eye contact. He has never been tall. Martin has never been short. 

That word again. Never. 

He has hesitant fingers and his brows raise in inquiry. Jon has been kissed but he has never kissed. He has never been the one to serve, to ask, to open up. Nervous creatures are content to be sought after, to never set themselves up for exposure. He's never wanted something enough to ask for it.

 _Never have I ever seen the world through your eyes._ _Never have I ever brought the light to you._ _Never have I ever woken up warm, the way I might with you._ His shoulders twitch, shaking the soldier's composure from between the scapulae. 

"We'll talk." 

_We'll talk on the other side of this war. On the daylight side of this battle. I'll come to you dead or alive, blood in my hair and ghosts on my hands. We'll talk. We may never touch but for fingertips on the glass of a mirror with worlds between us, but we will talk. If I lose you before I ever held you, then know that I meant it to be otherwise. This is why I'm going. This is why we fight, to keep a world around for you and me to have._

_This is why._

There is too much proximity. The water spots on Martin's glasses shine in the low light. The lamps burnish his red beard. And Jon's hands have found solid ground on Martin's forearms, his bony fingers wrapping around Martin's elbows.

What are you afraid of? He knows. He has known all along. Martin in the web of light, held exposed to the air. Jon's arachnid arms and skinny legs and his wild hunger. It's a terrifying thing, being loved by a lonely creature. Fear runs in his veins and he is afraid of touching Martin, of letting this horror drip from himself. 

"You should leave," Jon breathes. "While we're - "

"No."

"Don't be an idiot." 

"You don't get to tell me what to - " 

"I'm not telling you, I'm _asking._ " He doesn't say _I'll beg if I have to. You keep me from breaking apart._ He's got a heart made of superglue and Scotch tape. Martin licks his lips and shakes his head. Jon knows he's met the only creature more stubborn than himself. This room could be on fire and Martin would reach into the ash. Part of him wants to see how far he'd go. More of him wants to shield Martin from any flame. 

"You might get hurt." 

"I won't. Promise. I swear." 

"You can't make those promises, Jon. You know - "

Some kisses do the rest of the talking for us. He has never done this, not like this. Not propelling himself forward, not begging to be held fast. Even a half-certain heart kisses in terror, afraid of being pushed back. Shoved backward and cut away. Please, the love in us begs, please don't pull the rug out from under me. Let me get my bearings. Let me get my feet on the ground. When you shut the door, let me get my coat. Some change for the bus. 

Jon kisses Martin and he's got spiderwebs in the corners of his mouth and he's got a heart as sticky as a sundew, watching for flies. Waiting for something to swallow down, something to consume. _Why don't you seem afraid of me?_ Jon doesn't understand. He's terrified of his own self. But Martin pulls him closer. He is steady and even. His strong hands wrap around Jon's wrists, holding his hurried heartbeat carefully. He holds Jon in his cupped arms, his cupped hands, whispering _I'll get you out of here, set you free outside. In the sun, where it's warm._

When he pulls away, Martin's eyes are still shut. His breathing can be measured out by the isochronal beat of the clock. "I'm sorry," Jon murmurs. "For - "

Martin shakes his head. The light scatters over his hair, his skin, his bright eyes, looking like a thousand droplets of water in a web. Not everything that is caught must be consumed. "Don't," Martin says. "Just - when you come back, we'll talk. I'll wait."

Jon nods.

Martin reaches out, hesitates, then brushes the wild strands of hair out of Jon's face, tucking them behind one ear. From anyone else, it would be too much. Too precious, too infuriating. From a loving touch, everything's a different story. "Be careful."

"I will. You too," Jon says, breathing in and stepping back from these careful, cupped hands. He'll come back, be set free. For now, he will scuttle back into the dark. 

  
  
  
  



End file.
